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Biologists have long debated how the planet's first mass extinction took place 540 million years ago. Was it a huge meteorite or terrifying volcanic eruption, typical of Earth's other mass extinctions? Nope, per a recent paper that says it offers the first "critical test" of the theory that the first animals simply gobbled up or trampled on the species that preceded them, IFL Science reports. The arrival of Earth's first animals—creatures like jellyfish, vertebrates, and sponges—occurred during the so-called "Cambrian explosion" and spawned most of the world's animal phyla. Their apparent victims: the Ediacarans, multi-celled marine organisms with odd shapes like fronds, tubes, and discs, according to a press release. For 60 million years, many of them survived by just passively ingesting the water's chemicals via their membranes.

It seems the new animals easily dominated their motionless neighbors. "Modern animals are ecosystem engineers," study co-author Simon Darroch of Vanderbilt University told New Scientist in April. "They alter the environment, burrow into sediments, and prey on each other." How does he know that's what happened? Well, fossil and sediment evidence from a site in Namibia, southern Africa, suggest that Ediacarans were "ecologically stressed" at the time and saw their diversity declining, he says. And rocks from the period show increasing tracks and burrows by Earth's first animals, "presenting a plausible link between their evolution and extinction of the Ediacarans," per the release. Also interesting: "There is a powerful analogy between the Earth’s first mass extinction and what is happening today," Darroch says, because "new behaviors can fundamentally change the entire planet, and we are the most powerful 'ecosystem engineers' ever known." (One of those early predators was a sea scorpion that grew "as big as Tom Cruise.")

The ancient pagan delusion that images of wood and stone could hear or speak or generate living human beings is highly sophisticated and realistic compared to our modern “scientific” evolutionism. Modern “inflationary” cosmogonists actually believe that the entire ordered universe evolved out of nothingness. Modern “origin-of-life” biochemists have faith that dead chemical elements in a primordial soup generated complex living cells against infinitely impossible odds. And many modern physical anthropologists credulously insist that chattering chimpanzee-like “hominids” were miraculously transmuted into upright intelligent, talking, spiritual human beings – all in spite of the fact that true science utterly repudiates every aspect of this impossible evolutionary fantasy. Faith in metaphysical naturalism is what it is - but science it is not.

Pink Panther

Sep 8, 2015 11:37 PM CDT

I thought it was 543 million years ago. Well no one was there so you can put as many zeros as you like. Metaphysical naturalism but definitely not science!

JBnID

Sep 8, 2015 3:20 PM CDT

Another guilty human!! Get over yourself. You are 'natural' whether you like it or not.